Here’s the media release on the research I presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin on Saturday, April 21: A new study shows how far NPR’s Andy Carvin, known as “the man who tweets revolutions,” favoured the voice of protesters in his reporting on Twitter of the Arab Spring. The rigorous analysis of more than 5,000 tweets found that Carvin’s feed gave higher priority to the messages from

Angelica Peralta Ramos, multimedia development manager, La Nación in Argentina, gave an insight into the challenges of doing data journalism. In her ISOJ talk, she explained how La Nacion started doing data visualisations with few resources and in a less than friendly government environment. Peralta pointed out that Argentina ranks 100 out of 180 in corruption index. The country does not have a freedom of information law and it not part

At ISOJ, Alberto Cairo, lecturer in visual journalism, University of Miami, raised some critical questions about the visualisation of data in journalism. Cairo explained that an information graphic is a tool for presenting information and for exploring information. In the past, info graphics were about editing data down and summarising it. But this worries me, he says, as it is just presenting information but does not allow readers to explore the

Day two of the ISOJ started off with a keynote by Bob Metcalfe, professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise, University of Texas at Austin Cockrell School of Engineering. He is behind Metcalfe’s Law, which states that a communications network is proportional to the square number of connected users. Metcalfe set the scene by explaining how the internet has been disrupting industries for many years and posing a challenge

Linda Jean Kenix of University of Canterbury in New Zealand presented the results of a study of Samoa Topix at ISOJ. The study,with Christine Daviault, asked the question, Is this the future of online news? An examination of Samoa Topix. Topix describes itself as a place for people to share and talk about the news. The about page says ”Topix is the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and

Online journalism start-ups in Europe are struggling, according to a report from the Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen presented the results of the study, Survival is Sucess, co-authored by Nicola Bruno, at ISOJ. They found that journalism start-ups are facing a challenging time. First, news is still dominated by legacy businesses, with national differences. In Germany, there is a strong but declining legacy news media, whereas in

At ISOJ, John White, deputy editor for online, Winnipeg Free Press, Canada, outlined the paper’s News Café. A year ago, the Free Press created the café downtown, a space co-managed by a news organisation with a journalist in residence. Part of the reason was that the paper itself moved out of town to an industrial park. But another reason was to broaden the audience for the paper, which is mostly 55 plus.

Mark Briggs, author of Entrepreneurial Journalism and director of Digital Media at KING 5, Seattle, got people thinking at ISOJ by going over the six traits for entrepreneurs. First of all, you have to be able to get some funding. You need to be able to make the ask, said Briggs, or you are not an entrepreneur. Then you need to be able to sell, convince others about the value

The afternoon keynote at ISOJ was by Jim Moroney, publisher & CEO, Dallas Morning News, and chairman of the board, Newspapers Association of America He started off by insisting there was a connection between the two aspects of the title of his talk, Becoming The Economist of Metro Newspapers and the Pursuit of the Tablet Audience.  Moroney said the goal of journalism remained the same – an informed public that can make

The first academic presentation at International Symposium on Online Journalism came from Carrie Brown of the University of Memphis. For her study, #Memstorm: Twitter as a community-driven breaking news reporting tool, she looked at real-time flow of information on Twitter during the storms that hit the region. She highlighted how the hashtag, #Memstorm, did not come from the news outlets but from the public. Fox tried to created its own hashtag to brand the storms,